


If we come back (and we’re broken)

by Dreamlover1102



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: 6x11 thoughts, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Bellamy angst, F/M, Gen, Octavia Blake Ships It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-11
Updated: 2020-06-11
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:42:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24657028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dreamlover1102/pseuds/Dreamlover1102
Summary: He thinks it’s like looking in a mirror only this time, he knows the breath isn’t there to feel. No, this is more like how Bellamy felt on the ring. Only Gabriel is focused on algorithms that Bellamy couldn't hope to understand, instead of the burden of leadership he never wanted in the first place. If he kept his mind moving, maybe his heart wouldn’t remind him of empty spaces. Watching Gabriel is like looking out a window and seeing nothing but a burning sea of orange. This is a cross they both know how to bear. Only Gabriel is what happens when you walk in a straight line instead of a circle. There’s an end there, eventually, and he’s found it.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin
Kudos: 36





	If we come back (and we’re broken)

**Author's Note:**

> This is set during 6x11 - right before Clarke wakes up and a little after. Kind of filling the gap between when Clarke comes back after the CPR scene and what Bellamy’s thoughts are. Also, I seriously have some kind of addiction to Bellamy angst. Title is from Guiding Light by Mumford and Sons (which I don’t own, nor do I own the 100) Look I don’t intend to use Mumford and Sons to explain Bellarke but I mean the lyrics are sooo relatable it’s hard not to. 
> 
> HUGE SHOUT OUT TO evilswampwitch on Tumblr for editing this. I owe you, thank you so much!

Gabriel is fiddling with something at his work table, quietly mumbling to himself and it reminds him of Raven on the ring. Bellamy ignores it for the moment while he tries not to notice Octavia’s pointed glances. He’s not sure what Octavia is trying to say to him. There are many conflicting emotions that pass through her eyes when his gaze does wander her way. Sometimes it’s a plea, sometimes exasperation. He doesn’t give her a response, and he’s not sure if it’s because of his anger or his guilt. Her eyes seem to convey something that he can’t look at too long. More often than not, Bellamy sees the knowing glances she throws his way, her gaze then switching to the sleeping blonde in front of him. As if to say, “Will it be this time?” 

He uses the excuse of running his hands over his face, and letting them fall into his lap to distract himself from the thought. 

Bellamy is sitting in the chair he moved closer to Clarke while she recovers. His thoughts seem to spiral over each other, one after another, in an attempt to ignore the garbled radio static coming from outside the tent. Occasionally the static thins out, voices from different factions crackle over each other - not unlike how they are outside of their respective radio waves. The words make no sense to him but he tries not to let the sound spill into the cracks in his heart. Sometimes, he hears Clarke’s voice in the mix and each time it leaves bruises in the shape of fingernails digging into his arms. 

_ She called you on the radio every day for six years…. _

And that’s the crux of it, that phantom pang in his chest, the skip in the rhythm, like his heart stuttering at the sound of her lost in the crowd of voices that spit out over the droning hum of the anomaly. He’s counted each time her voice loops (37 now) and he wonders if this is his cross to bear. To hear this call on the radio, a call not meant for him. But like a beacon in the dark, he can pick her out from a sea of sounds every time. Does it count? Should it count? He wishes he knew. 

For someone who claims to be a history buff, he always seems doomed to repeat it. His hands shake, trembling in his lap, and he folds them together and leans forward for the third time to check that she’s still breathing. 

_ You still have hope?  _

He mentally jerks away from the memory, another echo in his head and he pulls himself from her sleeping (and still breathing) form, almost flinching when he hears Octavia stand up. He thinks she’ll say something, but this time she’s not looking at him but at Gabriel. 

The two share a quiet exchange before she flicks her gaze his way and then pivots on her heel and leaves the tent. He lets out a breath while Gabriel moves away from his work table to grab an old looking journal sticking out of a pile of spiral drawings before moving back to his work. Gabriel never even looks at Bellamy, so lost in his own thoughts. Bellamy watches as the other man stops for a moment, his hands fluttering toward the mind drive still sitting on the table. Bellamy sees Gabriel's hands tremble before pulling away and suddenly he feels a weight press down on his shoulders to match the one that squeezes his chest. 

_ Oh. _

He thinks it’s like looking in a mirror only this time, he knows the breath isn’t there to feel. No, this is more like how Bellamy felt on the ring. Only Gabriel is focused on algorithms that Bellamy couldn't hope to understand, instead of the burden of leadership he never wanted in the first place. If he kept his mind moving, maybe his heart wouldn’t remind him of empty spaces. Watching Gabriel is like looking out a window and seeing nothing but a burning sea of orange. This is a cross they both know how to bear. Only Gabriel is what happens when you walk in a straight line instead of a circle. There’s an end there, eventually, and he’s found it. 

Bellamy knows he should probably say something more. Maybe an apology he doesn’t really mean because the end of Gabriel’s line was like passing a baton. Bellamy held an empty bottle like that before and had no one to drink with. He tries not to think of it but it’s there already, her voice but not her, not his Clarke, and he has looked away but he can still hear them anyway. 

_ We’ve had our time… _

...Let them have theirs, is what Bellamy thought he’d say but Gabriel’s voice is shaking like he can’t finish his thoughts. He says goodbye like he’s never said it before.

_ I have to let you go now… _

But Bellamy can’t let Clarke go. Clarke isn’t Josephine and Bellamy isn’t Gabriel and their situation is much different, but Bellamy thinks this is just his heart making excuses. The memory shakes him loose from his position in the chair. There’s another echo in his head and he checks Clarke’s breathing a fourth time. His fingers drift up to move a lock of hair away from her face, he wants to stay there, her warm breath flowing over his fingers but he doesn’t linger too long. Octavia is still outside and Bellamy can hear her footsteps. It almost sounds like the anomaly gets louder each time she walks by but Clarke shifts in her sleep and Bellamy’s thoughts pull away from his sister and back to the inside of the tent. 

Gabriel has gone back to mumbling while he flips through the journal, but Bellamy sees the pages tremble and he wonders suddenly, like an epiphany, if  _ this  _ is what his mother meant by unconditional all those years ago. Bellamy knows that Clarke and Josephine are different people, Josephine was a sociopath. He also knew that her and Gabriel’s love spanned centuries, and he understands. Bellamy understands because he thinks that’s why his hands tremble too. It’s why he walked in circles around the ring. Because the sound of his footsteps on metal grates, bounced off the walls and almost sounded like someone was walking right beside him. He gets it, because Gabriel still pauses to glance at the empty mind drive on the table beside him and Bellamy still sees burning orange behind his eyelids when he goes to sleep. 

But Gabriel has surpassed him. He doesn’t walk in circles but in straight lines. There is an end and Bellamy knows that Gabriel will wait to see it the way Bellamy hadn’t. The way he still doesn’t. He wishes he had, but he closed the door and there’s an echo there that follows his steps when he walks. An out of sync rhythm he shouldn’t have created but it’s there now.

Gabriel doesn’t have an echo anymore when he walks or at least, if there is one, Bellamy can’t hear it. 

Bellamy hadn’t waited long enough and this, too, is his cross to bear because love comes in different forms and sometimes you have to let it go. He knows that because he’s done it before. He let it go to keep his heart beating on the ring and Gabriel lets go to make it stop. To end the repetition, the cycle… the  _ circle.  _

Bellamy tugs his eyes away but his guilt is only heavy enough to pull his gaze back toward Clarke because he isn’t really sorry to have her here instead of Josephine. He’ll never be sorry for that. Clarke fell asleep only twenty minutes after he brought her back. He wasn’t sure which one of them was more afraid but Gabriel reminds them that survival is often exhausting and both of them know that well enough by now to let her sleep. 

She does so only after she watched him pull up a chair nearby and he is still here hours later waiting. He knows he should be planning their next move. The rest of their people depend on it and he had left them and everything behind to bring her back. He remembers it only in fragments but he knows he had begged her, and God, and the universe to bring her back because he knew he couldn’t do it again. He couldn’t walk in circles just hear an echo again. The thought is enough to make him move out his chair and over to the map that’s laid out on the little table and he stares with eyes unseeing while he chews his lip in thought. 

There’s movement behind him and a soft gasp and he’s moving before he even realizes it’s Clarke because he just knows.

“Hey.” His voice is soft, and he forgoes the chair in favor of being closer so he sits next to her. He’s reaching for her hand and her eyes are panicked, making her stare unfocused as she looks around until it lands on him. 

“You’re ok. You’re still here.”  _ Hey, you’re ok. Just breathe. Just breathe.  _

Her chest is rising and falling rapidly but she sees him and it’s like his presence makes the rest easy to swallow because her eyes soften and there’s a little smile tugging the corners of her lips up. He squeezes her hand but can’t bring himself to pull away. He doesn’t think he ever will but he knows he has to eventually.

“Thanks to you.” she says, and her voice is rough from sleep. He thinks of getting up to fetch her water but she’s asking how long she’s been asleep. 

“A few hours,” he answers but it’s like her words finally catch up to him because guilt blossoms in his chest when he looks at her. Gabriel is pacing back and forth behind them and when she briefly glances away to look for the source of the noise, Bellamy uses the moment to blink back the pain of failure that pushes at his eyelids and swallows the lump in his throat. When her blue eyes land back on him, he is filled with regret. 

“I’m so sorry, Clarke.” His thumb is moving back and forth slowly over her hand, a movement he didn’t even notice he was making but her skin is soft and it gives him courage to continue. “I knew you were a target, and I didn’t protect you.” And this is his biggest regret, he knows. The one he’d tie to a lantern and watch to see if it would float. She begins to move, and he helps her sit up. He thinks she’ll take her hand back but she doesn’t. She leans forward and he can almost imagine the words he knows she’ll say because Clarke never lets him linger too long in his guilt. 

_ If you need forgiveness, I’ll give that to you. You’re forgiven.  _

“Bellamy,” he loves the way she says his name, like it’s a prayer, like it’s a rapture, like he really is forgiven for all of his sins, even when he knows he shouldn’t be. “You saved me,” but his sins are too clustered together, too heavy to float a lantern and he wrestles with what to say, and settles on the one he will let her forgive because it’s always easier for them to focus on what they can do next.  _ Together.  _

“So how do we save everyone I left behind?” 

But Clarke doesn’t let him go just yet. Doesn’t let him hide behind the shield of responsibility that he always falls back on. “If you didn’t, I’d be dead.” She tilts her head, “They all would be. Echo, Madi. Josephine would have made sure of it…” Here, she squeezes his hand, leans forward because she wants her words to have weight. Wants him to  _ hear  _ her. “Your plan was good.” And he knows she means it but he’s angry now. He needs to be angry at himself and he won’t allow her to take the guilt away or place it on someone other than himself because everything will crash down around him if he does. 

“My  _ plan  _ was to use Josephine’s mind drive to bargain for peace and now…” His hand falls away from hers because everything catches up to him at once. “There’s no mind on the drive.” He thinks of Gabriel and straight lines. 

“We don’t need the mind drive,” she says, “We’ve got me.” 

Her words cut like a razor straight to his heart, so jarring for a moment he is lost again in the memory of her lying dead on table while her heart monitor blares a deafening crescendo. 

**_No_ ** _. No way.  _

His head is shaking, his hands are trembling again. It takes him a moment to even realize he had said it out loud. She’s pulling away from him, already settled on the idea and he’s gearing up for battle because he plans to put up one hell of a fight about this. He can’t. He  _ can’t _ watch her place herself in danger. Can’t even contemplate the merits of it.

He’s back to the memory of her dead on the table, him frantically trying to keep her heart beating for her while she battles Josephine in her mind. His sister is yanking on his arm, her voice full of pain and sympathy and trying to be heard over his own sobbing breaths. 

_ Bellamy. She’s gone.  _

**_No. She’s not._ **

“Bellamy, if we don’t give Russell back his daughter-“

And he’s cutting her off because  **_no_ ** , he  _ really  _ can’t. 

“Clarke, as soon as he realizes you’re not her, which would be the minute you walk through the door and he checks the drive, you’re dead.”

_ Clarke, I need you. Madi needs you. Now wake up!  _

So focused are they on each other, neither side ready to yield because this is how they are, how they’ve always been, and sometimes the rest of the world tilts away when they pick up their swords and shields and fall into battle stances, that the sound of Gabriel’s voice startles them both. 

“So we put it back in.”

And Bellamy is furious because he’s so sick of pragmatism even if it’s well intentioned. He knows he owes Gabriel a thank you he doesn’t really have the words for. Words will never be enough but he forgets that in his fury because he’s so tired of Clarke having to offer herself like a lamb to slaughter. Gabriel is giving her more armor to fight with and Bellamy digs in his heels. Readjusts the grip. 

“That’s not happening. We appreciate what you did for us but these are our people and we’ll take it from here.” 

Clarke turns away from Gabriel and back to Bellamy, and he can see it in her eyes, that something has shifted in her. This is a battle he may lose and he hates it. His hands curl into fists, he raises his sword. 

“This isn’t just about our people…”

“Well, it  _ is  _ for me, Clarke.” His voice comes out rough, anger burning in his gut because doesn't she understand? His lantern won’t float and he  _ can’t  _ do this again. 

There’s movement by the door, and the tent flap raises. Octavia steps in and takes a look around. The tension seems to drain out just a little, he moves away from Clarke a bit to meet his sister’s assessing gaze. Octavia can tell there’s been another famous Clarke and Bellamy battle that Gabriel must have involved himself in. Bellamy uncurls the fists in his lap. 

“Good. Everyone’s awake.” She moves in further, trying to send out peaceful vibes. She walks through the tension in the air like she can’t feel it even though he knows it must be so thick she can choke on it. “So what’s the plan?” She asks, but no one answers and when she looks to Gabriel, he all but shrugs. There’s a moment when Octavia’s eyes swing back to him that he can almost read the question in her expression. “Will it be this time?” And it’s shame in himself that makes his shoulders slump and he looks at the ground before he drags his eyes back to Clarke. Her blue gaze is there to meet him and there’s an apology there. 

He knows they will revisit this fight. This battle is in no way done and when Gabriel walks away to give the three of them space, he thinks about straight lines on heart monitors and it’s enough to make him stand up and walk back to the map at the table to stare uselessly at it in unfocused thought. It’s only a minute before he moves away again, his feet dragging him toward where he knows he’ll find water. Clarke has to be thirsty and when he leans down to get a cup, he sees his hands are trembling. 

Outside he can hear the crackle of the radio and Clarke’s voice rings in his ears for the 45th time. He thinks back to the conversation he had with Josephine in the cave. When he found out Clarke could hear them. He remembers Josephine’s exasperated annoyance while he struggled not to spill out what he wanted to say because he refused to accept that he wouldn’t have another chance to say it to her and her alone. Without a sociopath for an audience and the crushing weight of responsibility and survival to drag them down.

He glances up from the cup to look over at Clarke and she meets his eyes across the distance. For a moment, there is nothing in the world but them and he thinks she can hear his thoughts as if he is saying them out loud to her back in the cave. 

_ I won’t let you die.  _

She smiles, the soft one she uses when there are too many emotions fighting for attention and she looks away, over at Octavia. Bellamy goes back to his task, too afraid to see the knowing in Octavia’s expression. Or the question that she keeps posing whenever she witnesses too much. 

“Will it be this time?” 

He doesn’t know. He uses the excuse of getting Clarke a cup of water, letting the mundane task distract him from the thought. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you think.


End file.
